Month: March 2016

Keeping your phalanges well groomed is a very important thing if you study a martial art. You don’t want to be the guy who just scraped the crap out of your training partner because you didn’t feel like spending a few minutes to trim. But even more than martial arts, finger nail grooming especially, can have a benefit in you career and how people perceive you in life.

Nobody likes a slob!

Imagine you’re reaching out to shake the hand of your company’s CEO and you stab his pointer finger with one of those claws you forgot to cut! Pretty embarrassing right? Imagine somebody mistakes you, a hard core dedicated code monkey fueled on adrenaline, dubstep, and Mt Dew for the receptionist because of the constant tap, tap, tap of those unkempt nails on the keyboard.

Whats more, longer finger and toe nails can be a health concern. According to the CDC, dirty unkempt nails “… can contribute to the spread of some infections, such as pinworms.”. Additionally, poor nail hygiene can lead to fungal infections. The cracks and crevices of your nails is an ideal place for anaerobic fungi to thrive.

So, not only is it inconvenient, dirty and viewed poorly by others, it can also be a health concern for you and others.

Good Habits

Cutting and trimming alone is not sufficient “good nail care” you also need to scrub under your nails regularly, removing dirt and debris that may accumulate there. Before trimming wash all your nail care tools to sterilize them in case something is still living on them from the last grooming session.

Aside from looks and diseases, good nail grooming habits can help to protect the health of your nails themselves. The Mayo Clinic reference link below outlines several conditions that can occur do to poop nail hygiene, including color changes, thinning or thickening, curling and deformations among other things.

So next time your thinking of skipping that nail trim and scrub do us all(yourself included) a favor and don’t!

Welcome back! This is part 3, and we are going to jump right in by configuring the security certificates on our identity server for the ADFS and IIS roles. If you’ve been following along as I’ve been publishing this multi-part article, I apologize for the delay between part 2 and 3, I had a hardware failure that delayed my writing.

Create a Certificate

If you are following along using a local network and VM machines then creating your own self-signed security certificates is likely going to be sufficient. This is what I will be doing for this tutorial.

However, for a production system you will likely want to use professionally created and signed certificates for your domain and server. Now is the time to get them and install them.

So we start by creating a certificate. Open up Powershell ISE once again and run the following script with your domain information.

Click “Next” on the first screen that appears, then select the “Stand-alone federation server” as shown below.

For large production environments you may want to create a federation server farm, but for this tutorial we only need one.

Click next then verify the certificate that is auto populated is the one you created earlier, and then click Next three more times.

Create the Application Server Security Certificate

Now we have to jump back over to our application server and configure it for use.

Lets start by creating a security certificate for it. You have two options, either use the same PowerShell ISE command string as you did on the identity server(with application server specific substitutes), or navigate to the IIS Manager and create the certificate through the IIS GUI. I’m going to show the IIS Manager approach since the PowerShell command has already been demonstrated.

Open the IIS Manager through the Tools menu of the Server Manager on the Application server.

Now navigate the the local server and click the “Server Certificates” icon at the bottom of the list of options in the center of the GUI.

Now we are going to create a self signed security certificate by clicking the link on the right side of the Server Certificates panel in the IIS Manager.

Now type in a friendly name for the security certificate. I use a similar name to the one created for the identity server.

Click next and the certificate will appear in the security certificates list on the previous screen. Next right click on the newly created certificate and select the view option.

On the screen that pops up navigate to the Details tab and click the Copy to File button towards the bottom right.

Now, on the screen that pops up click Next three times, then give the exported certificate file an easy to use and remember name and export location. Then click next.

Click Next, Finish and Okay to complete the certificate export. You can now close the IIS Manager. Now we are going to copy the newly exported certificate to the identity server. Once this is done, we will use it to configure a relying part with the ADFS server.

In Part 4 we will continue by configuring the Identity server’s DNS roll with resource records to allow IPv4 lookups for our two servers, and then the we will configure the Identity server’s ADFS roll with a relying part pointing to our application server.

If you have any questions or comments about the above article please comment below!